From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 11:53:49 -0400 From: "Russ Cox" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] Streaming on venti In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <25b4712ab3fa35f24d626db5ad42bef0@quanstro.net> Topicbox-Message-UUID: b584a986-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > - Using venti for backing up a streaming application is not a good idea. > - Contiguous storage areas may be better. So far I agree with you. > - One potential method to provide access to contiguous > disk space may be a rich partitioning system, e.g. GPT. I can't believe what a terrible idea this is. I honestly thought that PC architecture couldn't get any worse; congratulations. We were running out of 1-byte partition types so now we're going to use random 16-byte identifiers that no one can remember or even read? > - Plan9 does not support the last idea. No, Plan 9 transcends the idea. As Erik pointed out, Plan 9 couldn't care less what bizarro world your disks come from. To keep architecture-specific disk format goo from infecting the kernel, the disk device presents a very simple interface that can be used to implement any partitioning scheme you care to invent, even ones as disgusting as GPT. You write a simple user-level program that opens the raw disk device, reads the partition table, and then creates the partitions by writing commands like part linux 63 11425234 to the disk's ctl file. A GPT implementation would be only a few hundred lines confined to a single user-space program, if anyone cared to write it. Russ